by Reagan Woods
To his surprise, she nodded. “I’ll do it, then. Is it going to hurt?” Her big blue eyes held apprehension and guilt rocked him.
Lacy wasn’t blind to the ramifications of the request. He realized she was unsure where to draw the boundary between what she was willing to do to survive and what she wasn’t. Her stubbornness was probably a manifestation of fear of the unknown. Yet, she faced it with her eyes open.
“No.” He dared to offer a reassuring pat on the back of her hand. “I won’t let anyone harm you.”
It took him by surprise when she flipped her hand beneath his and gripped tightly. “I know I can be a little…difficult. I…just…thank you.” She dropped his hand as busied herself straightening her tunic.
Ignoring her momentary lapse, he teased, “A little difficult?”
She smacked his leg, an uncertain half-smile playing at her mouth. “Oh, shut up.”
Chapter 16
“Lacy, please hold still so we can get this over with,” Bram’s deep voice rang across the med bay. Now, she realized she’d been here before. This was the shadowy room where she’d initially woken to find him caring for her. It was also the same place where she’d first encountered the pirates. Bram stood a few paces away at a high counter where he alternately fiddled with a small silver box and lobbed impatient looks her way. She stood atop a small crate, her feet planted firmly apart while she admired herself in the reflective energy field the aliens used for mirrors. The scanning contraption was balanced on her head. It looked like a halo she’d seen in a painting once. A tight metal band fit over her scalp, stretching from ear to ear, with six shiny spikes studded in tiny crystals protruding from the band. The weight of the crown was anchored with a silky platinum chinstrap. Thin, flexible wires hung next to her ears and slid into the strands of her hair.
“I look like a medieval saint,” she gave another experimental shake of her head. The heavy headdress remained perfectly balanced.
Bram squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head like a dog coming out of water.
“What’s your problem?” She snapped.
“We only have a few hours left before we hit the Dead Zone,” the killjoy replied. “There is still much to do. Plus, I’d like to catch a nap and you’re due for another treatment.”
“I’m not sure why we have to do the treatment,” she pouted as she arranged her hair around the crown.
Bram’s reflection joined hers as he put an end to her fussing with a hand on each shoulder. His muscled body radiated warmth at her back. For the first time in a long time, she felt safe with someone. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t trust the feeling. Her rational side said it was too much, too fast, and likely an illusion brought on by forced proximity.
He’d gone out of his way to nurse her, to make her feel safe and to teach her the things she needed to know to survive. That had to be part of some nefarious plan. He couldn’t be this kind. Otherwise, he would agree to take her back to Earth. So, what was his deal.
“Watch it,” she cautioned in a sing-song voice. “Wouldn’t want to put your eye out.” Bram was a beast, but the crown of spikes on her head waived just below his nose.
Ignoring her inane statement, his concerned eyes met hers in the reflection. “Why wouldn’t you continue the treatments?”
She shrugged off his touch and turned to face him, the calculated action pushing him back a pace. He was getting around her defenses and she couldn’t allow that. “I wasn’t sure this assassin actually existed. I thought maybe it was something you made up to keep me in line, you know.”
“Why would I – never mind.” He motioned impatiently, his mouth flat with disappointment. “Continue.”
“The last several hours, I’ve watched you prepare your star charts and run all kinds of diagnostic scans. You’ve convinced me the danger is real,” she stated baldly. “Your whole demeanor has become more and more grim. You don’t think we can outrun or outgun him, do you?”
“Whoever the Council sent after us will be skilled,” Bram answered, meeting her stare. “Lyon and Zocan outfitted this freighter with top-grade navigation, detection and weapons systems. They knew all that wasn’t enough. That’s why they woke me and tried to incentivize me with…well, you.”
“So, you’re saying we have a chance?”
“Lacy, we won’t out-anything a CORANOS assassin,” his voice took on a scratchy quality. “His ship is faster than ours, his guns are more powerful, and his stealth tech is unparalleled by anything we have.”
Her heart sank at the summary. His fierce countenance gave nothing away, but, when she opened her mouth to push for a more definitive answer, he shook his head.
“I told you I’d get you out of this and I will.” He was in deadly earnest. “Now, hold still so we can give Zocan his scan.” He brandished the small control and stepped clear.
“This better not hurt,” she grumbled, momentarily allowing the subject to drop.
Bram’s thumb moved on the small box and the crown lit up. She squeezed her eyes shut as the glare became brighter and brighter. A tingling sensation crawled over her nape and scalp before rolling across the skin of her face. As soon as the feeling registered, it was over. She opened her eyes in time to see the scanner go dark.
“Alright,” he said with a tight smile. “Play time is over. Let’s get moving.”
Lacy loosened the strap, and Bram lifted the scanner away.
“If we’re going to die today, I think I should get to drive the ship,” she told him while she watched him stow the scanner in a padded drawer. Her stomach was a mass of knots. If he had a plan, she wanted – no, needed – to know what it was.
“We aren’t going to die. In fact, you can help set the trap.” Long strides took him across the med bay to a workspace she hadn’t noticed before.
Lacy liked the sound of that. “What trap?” She trailed him to the far side of the room where a counter ran the length of one wall.
With a tap of his finger against the counter top, he answered, “This one.”
To her surprise, the dull white counter surface was set up like her father’s old mechanic’s workbench. Things that might be tools were neatly laid out next to unfamiliar parts grouped in orderly piles. The whole thing looked out of place in the medical setting now that she really looked.
Bram gestured to a large clear tray stacked with tiny silver cubes. Reaching out to feel the cool metal with one hand, she glanced up at him in confusion. “What are we going to do? Challenge the assassin to a wicked game of Yahtzee?”
Lighting quick, Bram caught her hand between his rougher ones. A shiver traveled up her spine at the contact. “That’s reactive metal, and it’s fragile,” he cautioned. “We need every gram I’ve harvested from these old ship components. Once it’s in the vacuum of space, it will oxidize any other metal it touches.”
“So, what, you’re going to litter space with shrapnel?” She cocked her head, thinking over the ramifications. “I guess a ship flying through a field of this stuff would have quite a few issues, huh?”
He nodded, eyes fierce. “Exactly. Most shields won’t deflect particles of this size. They will bind with his hull and eat through. This will even the battle field at the very least.”
Frowning, Lacy carefully returned the cube to the tray. “When did you have time to do all this?” There were trays upon trays of the little cubes stacked neatly along several counter tops. She’d not paid attention to them before, not recognizing them as out of place in the foreign environment.
“I didn’t sleep much while I was waiting to see if you would live,” he answered simply, stepping back out of her personal space.
Lacy’s chest gave a funny lurch at Bram’s words. At every turn, he’d been one hundred and eighty degrees different from the other CORANOS invaders. She couldn’t help reassessing what she’d seen of him on Earth considering what she knew about him now. Maybe he wasn’t all bad, or, like her work in the club, perhaps he’d simply been doing his job.
Maybe he just hadn’t had the opportunity to be an evil lecher since he was in survival mode right now. She needed to figure out a way to determine if she really could trust him. If she were stuck on a ship for a month with him after Xani, how could she know he wouldn’t turn on her? Better yet, how did she know he would definitely take her with him? Had he made some deal with Lyon he was waiting to spring on her?
“How are we going to get this stuff in place?” She asked, shoving her worry about the future aside to focus on the practical.
“We use these.” He grabbed a stack of half-round cups. “These are ceramic shells. We fill these and close them, like so.” Demonstrating how two cups screwed together, he handed it to her. “Let’s get to work.”
Chapter 17
“Bram, where are you from?” Lacy asked curiously, taking a moment to roll her shoulders. The silver counter she worked at in the med bay was waist height for the tall aliens but came up much higher on her. Her neck and shoulders were screaming for a break.
She needed something to distract her from the monotony of filling the ceramic shells with the lethal dice. The last hour had been spent in a silent race to see who could fill more. Though, to be fair, Bram wasn’t aware it was a contest.
He frowned down at the shell in his hand. “A relatively primitive world in Doranos Space called Cuva.”
“What’s it like there?” Getting information out of him remained difficult even though they were communicating now.
“Hot, humid and dangerous,” he answered succinctly, continuing to pull ahead in the competition.
Lacy blew out a frustrated breath. He gave new meaning to the old cliché about strong, silent men. “You’re not exactly the best conversationalist, you know.”
“Yes,” he agreed, appearing unoffended by her observation.
His stack of filled mortars was quickly outstripping hers, she noted, redoubling her efforts.
Bram continued, “Why don’t you tell me about Earth before we came?”
“Why?” She stopped what she was doing to glare suspiciously over at him. “The aliens that ran the prison camp said you already knew all about us when you decided to take over.”
“I thought you wanted to talk,” he answered with a shrug and a lazy smile. Pointedly, he looked at her smaller stack of mortars, and she knew he was on to her. “So, talk. Tell me about your life before.”
Matching his nonchalant attitude, Lacy decided to do just that. If her hands were working faster than her mouth as she tried to catch him up, so what?
“I was fifteen when I finally worked up the nerve to run away from my father. There was a lot of fighting on the streets, but the Western Central Government and the Pan Asian Union hadn’t declared war yet.”
“The Last Great War.” Bram put in. “You left your father’s house before that?”
“Yes,” she answered, settling back into the rhythm of filling the shells, twisting them together and stacking them in neat rows. “Liam Callaghan, my dad, was a sonofabitch. He ran my mother off years before, and I thought I would be safer on the Outside – the land beyond the WCG’s boundaries. The Outside was kind of like the Wild West, anything goes and only the strong survive. I had this stupid, romantic idea of what life would be like out there on my own.”
She snuck a glance at his stack of mortars and redoubled her efforts. “It didn’t take long for me to realize I needed protection, but by then I couldn’t return home. The fighting had spread into my old settlement and decimated the place. I was one of the lucky ones who found a safe place, but I had to do a lot of things I’m not proud of to stay there.”
Instead of asking her to elaborate, Bram simply pinned her with his pink stare for a few moments before going back to work. “You’re alive,” he rumbled gently, without a trace of judgement. “That’s what matters.”
Lacy nodded to herself in silent agreement. Those perverted old men, the upper echelon WCG officers, had crazy sexual appetites but they’d kept her off the streets. In the Officer’s Club, there were monitors to make sure the women and men for rent weren’t mistreated – too badly. She’d had three meals a day and learned exactly what turned her crank. If her partners in kink weren’t precisely who she would have chosen, she overlooked that for the comforts offered. All in all, it could have been worse. That’s what she told herself every day that she was there. Every. Single. Day.
“Anyway, it wasn’t my dream job, but it was out of the war zone,” she continued. “Then, one day, the officers were all gone, and a group of the striped aliens showed up and loaded us onto a transport to the prison camp.”
“Corians,” Bram nodded. “The early collection teams were almost all Warriors – who are mostly Corian.”
“All that I’ve seen except you,” Lacy agreed with a nod. “The Doranos, or as I like to think of them since I met you, the skinny Doranos, ran the prison.” Bram’s shoulders tensed.
“You know they’re called work camps, right?” He asked as he screwed the two halves of his last shell together.
“You know they’re prisons, right?” She retorted with a snort. When she didn’t say anything else, he seemed to relax. For once, the silence stretching between them wasn’t uncomfortable.
Lacy felt oddly relaxed despite the danger that lurked on the horizon. When she thought back, she couldn’t remember a time when she’d been so comfortable with a man.
Her father’s erratic behavior had done nothing but inspire terror in her young heart. The boys, and later men, that she’d tried to forge relationships with had all been of a similar vein; weak and mean-spirited. By the time she’d hit twenty-two and settled into life in the Officer’s Club, she’d come to accept that men weren’t the answer but the problem in her life. She would never be able to truly let her guard down around a man.
Yet, here she was, prepared to throw her lot in with this man – an alien, no less – to survive the biggest threat she’d ever faced. The fact that she would likely be dead if it weren’t for him wasn’t lost on her either.
Whatever his motives, he’d kept her alive and out of Lyon’s clutches at significant inconvenience to himself. Her mercenary side, the gritty woman determined to not only survive but to thrive, needed to know just what the cost of all this protection and tutelage was going to be.
“I win,” Bram declared dryly.
“God damnit,” Lacy swore with a laugh, screwing her last ceramic casing together. “You cheated.” She waved an accusing finger at him.
He smirked. “I did no such thing. We need to load these trays on that cart, now.” He pointed to a two-inch thick sheet of metal. It measured roughly two feet by four feet, but it didn’t have wheels or a handle.
“That’s a cart?” She asked skeptically.
His white brow raised
. “You’ve never seen a hover cart?”
“Obviously not.” Tray of mortars in her hands, Lacy sidled up and pretended to study the silvery sheet. “Race you,” she challenged, sticking her tray on the cart and darting back for another.
Bram’s chuckle as he deposited two trays of mortars on the cart warmed her stomach in an alarming way. Attraction shouldn’t factor into this situation. She needed to find a way to quash that little spark she felt. Now.
Or maybe she should leverage it.
Lacy chewed her lower lip as she carefully and quickly stacked trays. Her hands brushed against Bram’s accidentally and she heard his quick intake of breath. As he spun to retrieve more trays, a plan began to form in her mind.
Did she have the balls to test her only ally? Did she have a choice? Once he had her alone, away from the assassin and the pirates, he could easily turn on her anyway. Wouldn’t it be better for her if she controlled the tone of their relationship for once?
“I will take care of these from here,” Bram told her as he backed away from the cart. He straightened to his full height and brushed his hands together as he surveyed their work.
She suspected he’d deliberately slowed his mov
ements, so they finished at the same time, but she didn’t call him on it. Instead, she frowned up at him. “Why? Won’t you just load them into the guns and be done with it?”
“No.” He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles wearily. “I have to stick a charge in the seam of each one. I’ll load them up after that.”
“Why didn’t we do that as we worked?” She groused exhaustedly.
“The charge is a putty,” he explained. “It’s quick and easy to set, but Zocan has it in lock down.”
“I’ll wait here,” she said, crossing her arms stubbornly. “There’s no sense in leaving the job half done.”
Lacy couldn’t tell if Bram simply needed sleep or if he didn’t trust her with the putty. She’d already proven she could handle dangerous material when she’d helped load the mortars.
He looked like he might argue but gave a sharp nod instead. “Wait here. I’ll return shortly.”
As far as victories went, it was small, Lacy thought as she studied his retreating back, but she’d take it.
Chapter 18
“I don’t know why you’re being such a prude,” Lacy’s voice edged toward hostile.
Bram pulled in a steadying breath and studied the shadowed ceiling of their cabin while she worked the healing wand over her abdomen. They were both exhausted from so many hours without sleep and nonstop activity.
It wasn’t easy for Bram to bite back the angry response on the tip of his tongue. Somehow, he managed. For something to do, he crossed their small cabin to collect a shallow bowl of nutribroth. He was desperate for a breather, a short break from her maddening presence.
Lacy had been a willing worker, toiling beside him for hours, but she was too relaxed around him now. Whenever they were close, she brushed up against his body or touched his hand to ask a question. He’d retreated to the other side of the counter in the med bay to work on the mortars.
